


Scenes From a Hat

by QuoteIntangible



Category: Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Asthma, Completed Scenes, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Sexual Content, unfinished stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-16 03:05:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16945806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuoteIntangible/pseuds/QuoteIntangible
Summary: These are scenes from stories that will never be finished. They are complete enough scenes to be posted, but not complete enough to be considered one shots or complete stories, at least not in my opinion. Some of these scenes were written for sequels I intended to write to my other stories, such as Trading Mistakes, that I never finished and some scenes were ideas I had for stories that never came to fruition. None of the scenes are connected unless otherwise stated. If you want to finish any of these stories, please read the author's note inside and then feel free to send me a message.1: Asthmatic Brendon (PG, fluff, tiny bit of angst)2: Mob Boss Spencer (PG-13, implied/reference non-con)3: Companion piece/follow up to Trading Mistakes (fluff and sexual content, borderline M)4: Brendon doesn't eat when stressed. Spencer takes care of it





	1. Chapter 1

**AN:** I have journal after journal and word doc after word doc full of scenes from unfinished stories and ideas that I have. Normally these ideas and scenes would never see the light of day. However, I have been in a writing rut lately and in an attempt to ignite the spark of creativity once more, I have been rereading through some of my old work. I decided to publish some of these scenes, mostly as a way to cheer myself up and in the hopes that publishing these will help me reignite my passion for writing. I must warn you, though, that these all come from stories that I will never finish. So please do not ask me to write more for a certain topic or for a certain scene because it will not happen.

**HOWEVER, if you are a writer and wish to finish any of these stories, please feel free to do so! All I ask is you send me a message first saying 'hey, this is what I want to do,' and credit me for my part. If you want, I can even send you any other notes or ideas I had on how the story was supposed to go. I would absolutely love to see any of these stories finished.**

With that being said, this first story is almost a complete one shot. In fact, it does read as a complete story and if I never told you there were supposed to be two more scenes you may never have even noticed it's not a complete story. However, **_I_** know this story is not as complete as I had envisioned it to be and I know exactly how those two scenes were supposed to go, which is why I cannot consider this story complete. Anyways, on to the story. If you want to know how those scenes were supposed to go, you can ask and I'll give you a dressed down version, or if you want to write your own ending, don't hesitate to message me. I don't bite. 

 ***

Brendon was five years old the first time he got yelled at for trying to be normal. He just wanted to go outside and play kick ball with his siblings and the other kids at the semiannual church picnic, but his mother said no because the pollen count was too high, and it was too humid, and his poor, weak lungs couldn’t handle it. If his mother could, Brendon was sure she would have placed him in a bubble and never let him out.

He snuck out of the church when his mother turned her back to help the other women set up the food on the three tables mashed together.  He made it 15 whole steps outside of the church before the tell-tale wheeze settled in his chest and his lungs started to constrict. His brother scooped him up, carried him back inside before his wheeze could turn into a full blown attack, and deposited him in front of his irate mother. She fussed over him and shoved his inhaler in his mouth, the horrible chemical taste flooding his mouth and lungs as the other adults in the room, the bishop, his family and the dozen or so men and women from his church, stared at him like he was a freak in a side show.

Brendon never tried to be normal again after that.

At seven, his brothers got to sign up for baseball and summer camp. When Brendon was seven, he taught himself how to play guitar alone in his room because he didn’t have any friends and the guitar was one of the few things his mother allowed him to touch. He had a gift, his mother said, when she found him playing a silly little song he wrote himself. She signed him up for piano lessons the next day.

It wasn’t baseball, but it was something.

He wasn’t allowed to go to Susie Simpleton’s birthday party when he was eight, even though Brendon thought she was kind of cute and Susie shared her fruit snacks with him at lunch every day. Susie’s mother called early in the morning for some reason Brendon doesn’t remember, her voice more nasally than usual and her question punctuated with three, quick sneezes. It wasn’t safe for Brendon to go to the party, his mother decided for him after that phone call. 

Big boys did not cry, so he played the saddest song in his piano book for hours until his mother started crying.

He still wasn’t allowed to go.

Most of his childhood and teenage years played out exactly the same: Brendon completely alone and friendless, unable to go outside or do anything really except play music in his room and go to school. If his mother could have afforded not to work and homeschooled him instead, Brendon thought he might have spent the first 18 years of his life locked in his home, knowing no one, but his family.

There was one other constant in every other memory Brendon had, that stupid inhaler of his. At first it sat in his mother’s purse, and then when he started going to school, it migrated to his own jacket pocket. He wasn’t allowed to leave the house without it. He had a nebulizer tucked onto the shelf in his closet for the times he got sick and shots of epinephrine in his fridge. He’d never had to use those, and he didn’t know what they were for. 

Brendon hated how different it made him, how the other kids would look at him and laugh when he had to use his inhaler, hated how the kids in gym made fun of him when he had to sit out of the class, hated how his teachers would sit him down after he had to use his inhaler and ask him, very seriously, if he was okay or if he needed to go to the nurse and the other kids rolled their eyes.

Normal simply wasn’t for Brendon.

Despite the lectures from his mother and his doctor on how important it was to take care of his health, Brendon purposefully left his inhaler at home when he went to school, or refused to take his medication until his chest was almost too tight to breath. His penchant to ‘forget’ landed him in the hospital more than once.

Still, he treated his asthma as something trivial and inconsequential until he was 13 years old.

At 13, his asthma nearly killed him.

His sister brought home a cold with her from college, a tiny little bug that her immune system kicked to the curb within a few days. But Brendon’s lungs were too weak to fight off the impending chest infection. Within six days, just a little cold turned into a doctor’s visit for a full blown chest infection, which turned into Brendon not breathing in the back seat of his mother’s purple minivan on the way to the hospital because he didn’t tell anyone just how hard it had become to breathe.

He finally found out what the shots were for.

He spent two months in the hospital, the first few weeks of which he spent in a medically induced coma attached to a ventilator. It took a few more weeks before he was strong enough just to sit up. His first clear memory upon waking up, was of his mother’s pale, drawn face, her hand tightly holding his, thumb rubbing soothing circles on his palm. She never left the hospital.

He took his asthma seriously after that, always had his medicine on hand, paid attention to his doctor and carried his mother’s handmade emergency protocol with him when she asked him too. He managed not to land himself in the hospital again for the rest of his high school days.

At 16, he found out why his mother was so obsessive about his asthma.

At 16, Brendon made his first real friends, not just childhood playmates, but people he actually got to see outside of school. Up until then, music had been his only friend. It understood his loneliness and frustration at being unable to do all the things he wanted just because he was born sick. And if he recorded the drum parts, and played along with his guitar, he could almost pretend there was another person in the room playing with him.

Then Brent asked him to join his band and Brendon didn’t have to record the drum parts anymore.

His mother flat out refused to let him join, because, “Being in a band is too strenuous for your lungs, and all those dusty instruments certainly won’t help.”  Brendon snuck out to attend his first practice. When they asked him to join, he said yes. He didn’t care what his mother had to say about it. If he had to sneak out every time to attend practice, he would.

He was pretty sure his mother’s shriek when he finally returned home was loud enough to be heard on Mars. “What were you thinking, Brendon Boyd Urie?”

“I don’t know, mom,” he sarcastically replied. “That maybe it would have been nice to have some friends for once?”

“You could have had an attack and no one would have known. You could have died. You are never leaving this house again, young man!”

“I’m gonna be 18 soon. What are you going to do, chain me up in the basement so I can never leave?  You can’t keep me locked up in this house forever. I am joining this band whether or not you want me to,” he said, storming from the room before she could reply.

His father, for once, was on his side and convinced his mother to see reason.

She came into his room later that night, and settled a hand on his shoulder while he lied with his back to her. “Baby, I’m sorry,” she said, stroking his back. “You’re right, I can’t…Did I ever tell you about the night you were born?”

Brendon turned around to face her as she settled against his headrest, her hands nervously twitching in her lap.

“I was just 27 weeks pregnant with you when I got into a car accident. It was my fault. I pulled out in front of another car. The crash made me go into labor early. They couldn’t stop it and you were born premature,” she said, pulling a picture from the pocket of her apron that he couldn’t see from his position on the bed.

“You were so tiny,” she said, smoothing her hand over the picture. “I didn’t even get to see you at first. They took you straight to NICU. You spent the first few months of your life there, lying in an incubator hooked up to a ventilator because your lungs were underdeveloped. I wasn’t even allowed to touch you.”

She handed him the picture. On the back it was labeled Brendon, and on the front was an impossibly small baby, swaddled in a white blanket and hat. Most of his face was covered in tubes and surgical tape, and there was a bright white light reflecting off the plastic incubator surrounding him. He had never seen this picture before. He had never seen _any_ pictures of himself from the first few months of his life. He just assumed that after five kids, his parents didn’t bother to take any pictures of his birth. Brendon didn’t even know he was born premature.

“You were so sick those first few years,” his mother said. “Your father and I spent a lot of time in the hospital ER wondering if you were going to be okay. I spent so many nights listening to you struggling to breathe, worrying you weren’t going to make it through the night.”

She took the picture back from him, smoothed out the corner and tucked it gently back in her pocket. “I’m sorry, baby. I’ve kept you so isolated. It wasn’t fair to you. Just, every time I think of what’s out there that could hurt you, I remember you as a tiny baby, too small for this world and struggling to survive.”

 

He looked up into his mother’s wet eyes and suddenly knew now why she had always been so over protective of him. It wasn't just love and it wasn't just he’s sick. It was guilt.

The thought doesn’t make him feel any better.

At 17, Brendon’s asthma saved him from getting kicked out of his home.

Because at 17, Brendon told his parents his liked girls, but he liked kissing boys too and he wasn’t going to believe in a God that could not accept that, and he wasn’t going to go to a church that didn’t even want him there to begin with.

His father said, “You live by my rules, or you get out.”

Brendon responded by not coming home for six weeks straight.

He stayed at Brent’s house a few days, then Spencer’s, then rotated between some of his casual acquaintances at school. But he kept going back to Spencer’s house every few days when the loneliness and the frustration crushed him under their weight and he just needed a friendly face to help dig himself back out again. He told himself he kept going back for Ginger’s delicious cooking and warm hugs, and not because of his tiny, minuscule crush on  Spencer, the maybe not so tiny crush that prompted him to tell his parents he liked boys to begin with.

Spencer, and Ginger, always welcomed him. He wondered if this was what home was supposed to feel like.

He took his inhaler and daily prescription med with him when he left home, but after nearly six weeks of being away, his inhaler was nearly empty and his daily prescription med was all gone. He’d need to return home soon, or go pick his prescriptions up himself.

He went to Spencer’s instead.

“Brendon,” Spencer said after pulling Brendon into his room after dinner. “Brent says you’ve been staying at his house a lot lately too.”

Brendon looked away and shrugged with one shoulder.

Spencer sighed before sitting down on his bed, pulling Brendon down next to him. “Don’t get me wrong, okay, I don’t mind having you here,” he said. His gaze was sharp and piercing and Brendon did everything he could to avoid it. “Do you have a home to go to?” he finally asked.

Brendon hunched his shoulders and grabbed Spencer’s pillow, just so he had something to hold onto. “I don’t know," he said, and he could feel the familiar tightness creeping across his chest, grabbing hold of his lungs in a vice grip and refusing to let go. He inhaled sharply, trying to force air into his lungs, and exhaled on a wheeze. With shaking hands, he fumbled with the zipper of his backpack, throwing his pencils, calculator, erasers and school ID on the ground before his hand finally grasped his inhaler. Avoiding Spencer’s gaze, he greedily sucked on his medicine, letting the chemical cloud ease the wheezing and tightness in his chest.

“You have asthma,” Spencer said, as Brendon attempted to contain the jitters his inhaler gave him. He was already enough of a nuisance, he didn’t need to cause more annoyance for Spencer.

Keeping his eyes glued to the inhaler in his hands, he said, “Don’t tell Ryan and Brent.” He liked being in a band, and he liked having friends for once. He didn’t want to lose either just because of his stupid lungs. He didn’t want any of them to think he couldn’t handle being lead singer anymore because of this.  

“Hey, it’s alright,” Spencer said, placing a hand on Brendon’s shoulder. He risked looking up into Spencer’s worried eyes. “It’s not a big deal.”

 _Tell that to my mother,_ he said, but smiled gratefully at Spencer instead. “Yeah, yeah, okay.”

Brendon’s mother tracked him down at the Smith house the next day. Apparently she’d asked Ginger to call the next time he came over. She placed an arm around his shoulder and marched him home, handing him refills on all his meds before sending him to his room.

He did his best to ignore the argument raging between his parents like fighting bulls. He wondered, as they argued, whether it was love or guilt that spurred his mother on, when the argument ended with a rather loud and screechy, “I will not let you kick my baby out so that he can die on the streets from his asthma.”

The battle was won for now.

*

Brendon angrily shoved his cellphone into his pocket and rubbed his hand across his wet eyes. There was an itch in his throat and a pressure in his chest like one of his brothers was sitting on him. He grabbed his inhaler that never left his pocket, and grasping it in both hands, rested it against his forehead instead of using it.

He was hidden behind the van, sitting leaning against the back tire. Despite living in a tiny van with Brent and Ryan, both were still a bunch of clueless fucktards about his condition and he wanted to keep it that way. Pete knew. Brendon wasn’t stupid enough to not tell his boss, and the label knew which was how he got all his meds these days. But Brendon wanted to keep his condition on the down low as much as possible.

He knew this conversation wouldn’t go well. He should have known it would end like this. He wished he’d taken up Spencer’s offer to accompany him, or, at the very  least, listened to his advice to wait for a better time.

Brendon just wanted to get it done and over with quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid. He just hadn’t expected it to hurt so much.

“You okay?” Spencer asked, sitting down next to him on the dirty ground behind their van outside some random truck stop in the middle of who knows where.

 “There’s not going to be a Urie family Monopoly death matches on Christmas this year, at least not with me,” he told Spencer. “My mother says she’ll work on it, but I’m not holding my breath.”

 “Shit,” Spencer hissed, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “I’m sorry. We can…”

“Don’t you dare say it,” Brendon interrupted. “I am not breaking up with you because my parents are a bunch of dickbags. It’s not gonna change who I am.”

“I’m sorry,” Spencer said, pressing a kiss into the side of his head.

“Yeah me too.”

*

Spencer, of course, technically knew his boyfriend was an asthmatic, since Brendon told him and he’d seen his boyfriend use his inhaler dozens of times since he found out. But Brendon never talked about it and always played it off like it was no big deal. So, Spencer thought nothing of it.

Spencer finds out just how serious his boyfriend’s condition is when Pete, the man (and he uses that term liberally) who is his boss, completely forgets about his employee’s condition (that he had complete forehand knowledge of, thank you very much) and plays a prank on the two of them that is not very well thought out.

 _Meet us in our greenroom or you’re fired,_ Pete’s text says. He doesn’t specify who ‘us’ is and he only sends the message to Spencer. The text is followed by a _;p._ Spencer rolls his eyes and only takes Brendon with him, because the other two are likely to throw a bitch fit at whatever menial or demented task Fall Out Boy want them to perform in their mission to embarrass the shit out of Pete’s ‘baby band,’ as Joe calls them, during their first ever tour.

They have to cut across the stage to get to Fall Out Boy’s green room, and it doesn’t cross Spencer’s mind that this might be just another elaborate prank until the floor of the stage is giving away beneath his feet and he’s falling. _A trap door,_ he has enough time to think before his feet hit the ground with enough force to send him tumbling to the ground.

Brendon hits the dirt with a thump and an ‘oof,’ and says, “Pete, you mother fucker,” before the trap door closes above them. “Must be a theater stage,” Brendon pointlessly says to him, and he resists the urge to tell him ‘no shit, Sherlock.’ After all, this isn’t Brendon’s fault.

Using his cellphone that is thankfully still in his pocket, he calls Ryan to come rescue him. He gets a hasty and guilty, “I’m not allowed to let you out,” before the line goes dead. Spencer swears under his breath. “We’re on our own,” he says. “Let’s see if there is another way out.” He reaches out in the pitch black darkness surrounding him in the direction he thinks Brendon is in. He ends up poking him in the ribs and slides his hand down until he finds Brendon’s hand so he can pull him to his feet. He uses the tiny bit of light his cellphone emits to find the rough cement blocks of the wall.

“You go that way, I’ll go this way,” he says gently nudging Brendon in the opposite direction as him.

“I found a door,” Brendon says, somewhere near his right a moment later. He hears Brendon messing with the handle and then says, “It’s locked.”

“Of fucking course,” Spencer mutters. He slowly slides along the wall until he finds Brendon again and sinks down to the floor, taking his boyfriend with him. Brendon startles at the sudden move and ends up falling into his lap. Spencer wraps his arm around Brendon’s shoulder as his boyfriend settles into his side, head resting on his shoulder. There’s something not quite right with the way Brendon’s breaths feel, but he brushes it off. “We’ll just have to wait them out."

“Hey, don’t get mad,” Brendon says after a couple minutes of sitting in silence and Spencer tenses underneath him. Brendon’s breathing has steadily gotten more uneven, and Spencer can now hear the wheeze every time he exhales. He wonders why Brendon hasn’t used his inhaler yet. “I can’t find my inhaler,” he says. “I think it slipped out of my pocket when we fell.”

“Do you need it right now?” he asks, the answer doesn’t really matter though. Pete could blackmail everyone into leaving them in this tiny room for hours. They’re definitely going to need to find his inhaler before then.

“Soon,” Brendon replies, sharply inhaling, his shoulders jerking beneath Spencer’s arm.

“Okay, wait here, I’ll find it.”

He shuffles around the room slowly, using the tiny light of the cellphone to illuminate the ground just enough. He finds the inhaler in pieces. Brendon must have landed on it when he fell.

“It’s broken,” he says. “Beyond repair.”

“I have a backup in my bag in the van,” Brendon says.

“Do you need it right now?” he asks, hoping the answer is no. Who knows how long they’ll be in here for?

Brendon doesn’t reply. Spencer knows what his silence means. “Yeah, okay,” Spencer says. “How bad of a situation are we looking at if you don’t get your medicine soon?”

“Um, it varies,” Brendon shrugs as Spencer settles down next to him again and turns off the light on his cellphone. “I might be fine without my inhaler for the next few hours, or I may need a hospital very soon.”

He tries to play it off, but Spencer can here the undercurrent of worry in his tone. Spencer maybe panics a little because hospital and soon don’t mean good things. He calls everyone, Ryan, Brent, Pete, Andy, Patrick, Joe and a few techs for Fall Out Boy who’s number he has. Finally, Pete answers his phone the second time he calls.

“Brendon’s having an asthma attack,” he says trying to give as much information as possible while also relaying the seriousness of the situation with as few words as possible before Pete can say anything stupid or hang up. “His inhaler broke when we fell and you need to get us the fuck out of here now.”

“Shit, what?” Pete says.

Spencer growls into the phone because Pete is kind of useless in an emergency. “Hand over the phone to Andy or Patrick.”

“What is going on?” Patrick’s voice filters through the phone.  Brendon muffles a cough into Spencer’s shoulder, his wheezing seeming louder in the small confined space. “Pete looks freaked, and guilty.”

“We need you to get us out of here right now,” Spencer repeats, frustrated that no one has moved their fucking asses yet to come rescue them. “Brendon’s having an asthma attack, and his inhaler broke when we fell.”

“Brendon has asthma?” Patrick asks.

 _Seriously,_ Spencer thinks, _seriously?_ “That is not important right now!” he snaps.

Brendon pries the phone from his hand and muffles another cough into Spencer’s shoulder before rasping into the phone, “Patrick,” Brendon says, his voice starting to sound like someone scraped it over a grater. “I have a spare inhaler in my bag in the van in the side pocket on the left. Send Ryan or Brent to go get it and have them bring it to me. But could you please let us out in the meantime? The dust is killing me…literally,” he says with a huff of laugther that sends him into a coughing fit.

“Already on it?” Patrick says, and Spencer breathes a sigh of relief, thinking ‘thank fuck, at least one of them was acting responsibly.’ He hears a clamber of feet on the stage above them, then a squeal of metal like nails on a chalkboard. Before Patrick says, “uh, the trap door won’t open.”

Spencer feels his pulse quickening as _shit_ and _we’re so fucked_ runs through his mind. Brendon takes as deep of a breath as he can manage, before calmly saying into the phone, “there’s a door down here, but it’s locked from the outside. Can someone open that?”

“I don’t have a key for that,” a voice he vaguely recognizes as belonging to the guy who worked for the building says. “It won’t open from either end without a key.”

“How long will that take?” he hears Pete ask, and the murmuring reply of, “I don’t know. Could be hours.”

“Brendon, will you be okay for a couple of hours?” Patrick’s voice cuts above the murmurs.

“Probably not,” Brendon replies, and he doesn’t sound scared or panicking yet, just resigned.

There’s more indistinct chatter, voices arguing with each other before Andy cuts through the noise. “Call 911.”

“But,” someone argues, but before Spencer can start yelling through the phone, Patrick cuts off the idiot arguing.

“Brendon doesn’t have hours to wait. We need the fire department to break down the door now. Do you need an ambulance?” Patrick asks, and it takes a moment for Brendon to realize he’s talking to them.

“Not at the moment,” Brendon replies.

“Have an ambulance on standby,” Patrick says anyways, presumably to whomever called 911. “Do you want us to stay on the line?”

“No,” Spencer says. As nice as it would be to know exactly what was going on up there, he thinks, right now, he needs to focus on Brendon and they’ll only distract him.

“Okay, I’ll call back when the fire department gets here. And if Brendon starts to get worse, call us immediately, okay?”

“Yeah,” he agrees, though there’s nothing any of them can do if Brendon suddenly makes a rapid decline.

*

“On a scale of one to ten, how bad of a situation are we looking at right now?” Spencer asks after 15 minutes of sitting in complete darkness, doing nothing but listening to his boyfriend wheeze and the smothered sounds from the stage above. It was just the shuffle of feet and indistinct conversation, but just a moment ago the clamor rose in the volume, the shuffle of feet a little heavier.

“I’m fine, Spencer,” Brendon reassures, snuggling further into Spencer’s side.“Stop freaking out. Everything will be okay.”

Spencer is going to strangle his boyfriend, because everything is most certainly _not_ okay. He’s saved from his thoughts, however, by the vibration of his phone. He digs around in his pocket, trying to reach his phone without jostling his boyfriend too much.  He doesn’t think that’ll make Brendon’s breathing worse, but he doesn’t want to risk it either.

“What?” he snaps into the phone, and this better be good news, or Spencer’s going to start ranting.

“The fire department are here,” Pete says. Spencer detects a hint of guilt in his voice. Good, he thinks. Serves the fucker right.

“Yeah, kind of guessed that one,” he says, and really, he doesn’t mean for that to come out as bitchy as it sounded. But he’s stuck in a tiny room with his boyfriend who can’t breathe right, and the oxygen deprivation must clearly be messing with Brendon's head already, because Spencer does not think he’s freaking out as much as he should be given the circumstances.

“Um, yeah,” Pete says. “They’re going to cut you out, because apparently the door down there is solid metal. There’s going to be a lot of debris falling on the two of you, though. The paramedics say if you can, and if it doesn’t smother Brendon’s breathing too much, to try and have him, well both of you, breathe through a shirt, or some other light weight cloth so you don’t inhale too much of it.”

“Sounds good, Pete,” Brendon says, before Spencer can start ranting, and ends the call abruptly.

“What’d you do that for?”

“Because I could tell you were going to start yelling,” Brendon says with another huff of laughter that just like last time sends him into another coughing fit. This one lasts longer than the last, and Brendon’s breathless, and clearly struggling to draw in oxygen by the end.

“Jesus, stop doing that,” Spencer says, loosening his arm around Brendon’s waist in case that’s restricting his breathing. “And one of us has to freak out here, because you’re clearly not thinking straight.”

“Spencer, if I freak out now it’s only going to make my breathing worse. Besides, I’ve been in worse situations. There’s really nothing to be nervous about yet.”

“If you say so, crazy person,” Spencer says. “Is there anything I can do to help, at least?” he asks, pulling his shirt up to cover his nose, Brendon doing the same, as some sort of machine roars to life, and the floor above their heads starts to vibrate. He can feel particles of dirt, debris, and dust hitting the bare skin of his arms and face, and settling in his hair. “Jesus, that’s so disgusting. They better let us shower again.”

“There is one thing … you can do,” Brendon says, his words punctuated with heavy wheezing and stuttered breaths. “Can I lean my back against your chest? If I can feel you breath, it’ll help me keep my breaths even. You have to breathe deeply though, and be calm, otherwise it won’t work.”

“I can do that,” Spencer says. “Promise.” They shuffle around until Brendon is sitting in between his legs, back pressed flush against Spencer’s chest. He wraps an arm around Brendon’s waist, trying to keep his arm as far away from his chest as possible.

He inhales, _one, two, three,_ and exhales, _one, two, three._ Inhale, _one, two, three,_ and exhale, _one, two, three._ He feels better after a few moments, the panic starting to ebb as his controls his breathing. He wonders if that was Brendon’s intention from the start.

Sneaky bastard.

Brendon coughs again, a sound emanating deep from his chest that Spencer can feel vibrate through his own chest. And then … nothing. He doesn’t inhale, he doesn’t exhale, nothing. Brendon’s hand clenches the pant of his thigh, straining the fabric upwards as his legs kick out. Spencer feels his own pulse quickening with that of his boyfriend’s.

Then Brendon’s chest jerks, and he sharply inhales, the wind whistling as it squeezes its way out of his lungs.

“I don’t know CPR,”  he blurts out in a frenzy.

There’s barely a ghost of a laugh from Brendon. “Spencer, relax. Breathe,” he says, though he has to struggle to take a breath between each word. “I’m fine,” he murmurs. “Everything’s fine.”

“Shit, sorry, sorry,” Spencer says, and continues to count.

Inhale, _one, two, three,_ and exhale, _one, two, three._

Inhale, _one, two, three,_ and exhale, _one, two, three._

“Better?” he asks. Brendon’s head lolls back against his shoulder, and nods.

The machine cutting them out abruptly cuts off. There’s a loud cracking noise, and then light begins to filter through a hole above their heads.

Out of all the things Spencer wanted to see first, Pete mother fucking Wentz was not one of them, but it’s his head peeking through the hole. “You guys okay?” he asks.

“No,” Spencer snaps. “Get us the fuck out of here.”

Pete winces. “Yeah, sorry, working on it. Um, I got his inhaler,” he says, throwing it down at Spencer who fumbles it, but managers to catch it before it hits the dirt. He holds it out to Brendon, who wraps a hand around his forearm and pushes his arm down.

“Not going to work?” he asks Brendon softly. He shakes his head no in response.

“Brendon says it’s not going to work now,” Spencer yells up at Pete.

Pete disappears for a second, and Spencer suppresses the urge to tell them to hurry the fuck up. Seriously, what is taking so long? When Pete reappears, he asks, “If we put a ladder down, Brendon can you climb up?”

Brendon ponders it for a moment, before nodding.

“He says yes,” Spencer yells up to Pete.

 

By the time Spencer follows Brendon up the rickety looking ladder they found propped up back stage, the paramedics already have Brendon strapped down, an oxygen mask covering his face. Pete is hovering next to the stretcher, but Patrick and Andy are keeping everyone else that has gathered to watch a safe distance away.

“I can go to the hospital with him,” he hears Pete say to the paramedic.

“No, I’m going,” Spencer insists. He’s got a good few inches on Pete, and he uses every one of them to tower over him. There’s a ping of satisfaction that zings through him when Pete shrinks away. “You’re an asshole,” he says to Pete as he follows the stretcher out to the ambulance. “And you’re totally paying for that hole in the stage.”

He doesn’t turn around to see Pete’s response.


	2. Chapter 2

**AN: You will need a little bit of background context to understand this one.** The idea I had for this was that Spencer is a mob boss/casino owner, and Brendon is a singer and performer at the casino and Spencer's boyfriend. Shane is a rival casino owner and budding mob boss who wants to get in on Spencer's operation. Zach is an employee of Spencer, but his job is to work undercover in Shane's operation so that Spencer can keep tabs on Shane. In an attempt to get information on and profit from Spencer's illegal mob activities, Shane kidnaps Brendon as blackmail, but he makes the mistake of hurting Brendon. Zach gets Brendon out of there, and then this scene happens, with Spencer making a call to Shane and a little bit of the aftermath. 

**

“Can you get him out of there safely, Zach?” Spencer asks, listening as the other end of the phone goes silent. He’s giving up a major playing piece having Zach pull out of the organization now, but the plans changed and they both know with what’s coming next, he’ll need Zach by his side.

“Yeah, yeah,” Zach says a little too quickly. “I can have him with you in 20. I’ll text you when we’re safe.”

He waits until his cellphone buzzes with a text that says, _I_ _n car. b there in 15,_ before ordering Jon to make a call to Shane. Spencer wants to see Shane's face when he reveals to the soon-to-be-dead idiot that not only does he no longer have his one and only playing chip, but his time on this Earth is going to be cut short very, very soon. No one touched Brendon and got away with it.  _No one._ And the whole underground world in which he belonged to was going to find out why. 

Jon nods and pulls up the program, sending the call onto the projector.

“Call Pete and Patrick, too. Let them know what’s going to happen and tell him I will call them personally with further instructions.”

Ryan wraps his hand around Spencer’s wrist, a quiet warning of ‘don’t do anything brash, or stupid.’ But Spencer does not make rash decisions. He thinks everything through, with back up plans for his back up plans. And they just went from Plan D, humor the gnats because they’re not worth my time to squash, to Plan S, tear them apart, burn them down, and pour salt in the ashes.

Shane lets the call go unanswered long enough to send the message that he _thinks_ he is in control and he’s going to make Spencer wait. Shane's face is smug on the screen when he finally answers.  A surge of red, hot fire pulses through Spencer's chest and up his throat, but he clenches his teeth and waits for it to pass. “Knew you’d call,” Shane says, settling down into a chair in front of his computer, Brent coming into view behind him. Both of their lips are swollen and red, and Brent keeps reaching down to readjust himself while Shane’s tongue keeps darting out to run across his lips. _You sick fucks,_ he thinks, clenching his teeth to keep the words from bubbling to the surface.  “Ready to hear my terms?”

A calm rage settles in his bones and across his face. This is something he’s never felt before, but he’s seen it on his father’s face enough to know what it means. He can still picture the way his father’s face turned completely neutral, his eyes blank and mouth a straight line. Whether or not his father’s enemies knew it, the fight was over the second that look settled on his father’s face and he became a ruthless, but oh so efficient, killer. His father’s plans were always fail proof, but they took a sharper edge and added a little more violence, his tactics crisp and clean, but still somehow so bloody.

Ryan tightens his grip on Spencer’s arm, but he shoots his best friend a reassuring look. He’s got this.

Spencer doesn’t move, doesn’t acknowledge Shane or Brent as the sick fuck reaches down towards his crotch again and readjusts himself. It’s clear he’s hard even with the grainy quality of the projector and Spencer knows exactly what he is thinking about and exactly what he would be doing right now if he wasn’t on this call. Spencer doesn’t let the building rage reach the surface.

Shane clears his throat, his smug look faltering, but with false bravado he says, “I want in on the drug trade you got going on in the lower quadrant.  I want to know everything, who your supplier is, what routes you got going on, who your major dealers are. You give me full access, and a cut of the profits, and I’ll give you back your boyfriend.”

 

Spencer presses a cigarette to his lips, flicking the lighter several times before lighting it. Smoking is more Brendon’s thing, but he indulges occasionally, especially for effect. Shane starts fidgeting as the silence wears on, running his thumb across his swollen lips and then down to his pants. Spencer lets him squirm.

The door to his left opens, Zach shuffling in carrying Brendon bridal style in his arms. The blanket is still wrapped around his boyfriend, but Spencer can see his face, the glazed over eyes, the bruise that takes up half of the right side of his face and the scabs on each end of his lips probably from a gag or… He twists his face into a sneer and starts laughing, a rough grating sound somewhere between amused and ‘I’ve fucking lost my shit.’

Shane startles and jumps to his feet, Brent taking a subconscious step back.

Spencer stands to his feet, Jon following him with the camera and slides next to Zack, cradling the back of Brendon’s hand with his free hand.

“Zach, you…” Shane splutters.

“Don’t take it personally,” Zach says. “Everyone knows you don’t touch Brendon. I’m just saving my own skin.” Zack deserved an Oscar for that performance. Neither want Shane to know exactly how much Spencer knows about him.    

"You just couldn’t resist fucking him, could you?” Spencer says evenly, hands steady as he takes a long drag from his cigarette, letting the nicotine fill his lungs. ~~~~

He waits for the ‘I didn’t do it,’ or maybe, ‘It was all Brent.’ Instead Shane remains silent, narrowing his eyes in a challenge. “This doesn’t change a thing. You still can’t touch me,” he sneers.

“I let you carry on with your petty business, because up until now, you’ve been nothing more than a minor nuisance and not worth my time or resources.” He deliberately puts his back to the camera. Putting his cigarette out on the desk with one hand, he brushes Brendon’s sweat soaked bangs out of his eyes with the other and places a chaste kiss to his boyfriend's forehead. With his back still to the camera, he says, “But now you’re about to find out why I own this town.”

He strides from the room, knowing Zach and Ryan will follow. “Find Dallon and haul his skinny ass here,” Spencer says to Ryan. “Take Andy with you.”

He forces the door to his room open hard enough that it bounces of the wall.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” Zach apologizes again. “I didn’t know they had him until I found him tied up to Shane’s bed and they’d already…yeah,” he says, rubbing a hand across his bald head.

“What they’d give him?” he asks, moving aside from the door just enough to let Zach in.

“Uh, Special K, I think, there was a vial on the nightstand,” he says, laying Brendon gently on the bed.

Spencer nods and walks towards his bed. “Go get the doc.”

He waits until Zack is gone before crawling in bed next to Brendon, settling on his side, his arm wrapped around Brendon’s waist. When he presses a kiss to his lips, blurry eyes snap open and the body beneath his hand tenses, a whimper slithering into the air between them.

“Sh, it’s just me,” Spencer reassures, cupping Brendon’s jaw gently. “Just me.”

“Spencer,” Brendon whispers, brown eyes sliding up to meet his with tears leaking out of the corner of his eyes. Spencer brushes them away with his thumb.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he says, pressing his head into Brendon’s covered shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

He feels Brendon nod, but a knock on the door cuts off any reply he may have had.

“It’s me,” Gerard says, poking his head in the door, Zack close behind him. Spencer motions them in, and sits up, but doesn’t get up, instead placing a hand on Brendon’s ankle that’s peeking out beneath the blanket wrapped around him.

Gerard flits into the room, eyes wandering around. His hands twitch as he grabs one of the chairs in the room and drags it next to the bed. “Zach didn’t tell me much, but…” _he told me enough._


	3. Chapter 3

**AN:** This short story is an idea I had as a companion piece to Trading Mistakes (You've Got Scars As Deep as Mine). If you haven't read that story, you might be a little confused as to what is going on here, but I also don't necessarily think that you need to read that story to understand this one. All you need to know is that Dr. Cas is Brendon's therapist. I would also like to reiterate that I 100% believe that relationship do not need sex to work. I, myself, am asexual. This is just an idea I had as a possible followup to Trading Mistakes. There is no non-con in this scene, but there is a fair bit of sexual content. So  **WARNING: LOTS OF M/M SEXUAL CONTENT** , like masturbation and watching porn. 

*******

Brendon bucks his hips up into the warm, wet mouth wrapped around his hard dick. The hands on his hips tighten, grip a touch painful and hard enough to leave bruises. Spencer holds his hips down and settles his weight across Brendon’s legs so he can’t move. Obscene moans pour from his parted lips as Spencer hums around his erection.

 _You dirty cheater,_ he wants to say, but then Spencer is humming around his dick again. His toes curl and he barely has time to stutter out a warning before he’s coming down Spencer’s throat.

It’s only after he comes down from the high that he realizes Spencer’s weight is pinning him down to the hotel bed. He waits for the familiar prick of panic, for his heart to start racing, and for his mind to say _getoffgetoffgetoffgetoff._ But…

Nothing happens.

Spencer shimmies up, until he’s completely boneless on top of Brendon, beard tickling Brendon’s neck. He pets Spencer’s head, kisses his ear and lets Spencer’s weight comfort him.

The panic never comes.

Maybe it’s just a fluke.

He holes himself up in his bunk alone, and decides to test that theory by watching gay porn. It’s probably not the best idea, but he goes to his favorite website and clicks the tag that says "gay." He browses for a while, searching for something vanilla, not too kinky and not too, well, porny. He finds one with a top that, if he squints, kind of looks like Spencer, and presses play, finger hovering over the mouse and ready to click stop the minute the panic starts.

He makes it all the way to the end of the video, so he clicks on one of the links below which has the same top. By the time he gets to the end of the second video, he’s hard, hand subconsciously reaching into his pants. He contemplates jerking off in his bunk, before going to find Spencer.

He gets a little excessive about researching gay sex after that, but not in a creepy way, he swears. It’s not just porn he watches, thank you very much, but he joins a forum and talks to other people in his situation. Some on the forum are more helpful than others and send links to educational articles. He learns about the best positions for first times, how to find his prostrate and more clinical information on prepping than he needs.

He reads it all.

It takes him a few weeks, okay months, longer to work up to the next step.

He buys some more lube at a truck stop between Chicago and whatever city is next on the tour, takes a few more days to work up the nerve, smokes a shit ton of pot and holes up alone in his bunk again. Shimmying out of his pants and underwear, he ques up his favorite porn, spreads a huge glob of lube over his pointer finger and inserts it into himself.

It doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t feel like anything but slimy either. He wiggles his finger around a little bit, testing the feeling, before adding a second finger. It easily slides in with little resistance. He curves his finger like a couple of the articles told him to do, keeps moving his fingers around until he finds it and oh… _oh._

He lets his fingers explore, as he lazily fists his cock, taking his time scissoring himself open and pressing his fingers in deeper before returning to his prostrate.

He imagines Spencer doing this to him, as the bottom in the porn video obscenely moans and tells the top how much he loves his cock as he rides him. The little breathy, but insistent moans from the top make his dick harden more than the bottom writhing and grinding on the other guy’s dick. He’s always been more auditorily stimulated than visually.

He rubs his fingers insistently over his prostrate, sending sparks of pleasure to his groin that build like water behind a damn before he’s rolling his eyes into the back of his head and biting off a moan as he comes.

The lack of panic fuels him on.

Still, he knows Spencer’s cock is a little bit bigger than two fingers.  He waits until he’s alone in the bunks before trying again. This time he goes for three fingers. He takes a few, deep breaths like the articles recommended, forcing himself to relax before adding a third finger. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts ....

But the articles warned him about this. He’s okay, he’s fine. He isn’t going to panic. Brendon continues to take deep breaths, willing his muscles to relax until the pain fades to a dull ache. He searches for his prostrate again, and forgets all about the ache when he finds it.

Still, he doesn’t tell Spencer about it and he doesn’t tell his therapist about it either.

Someone on his forum sends him an article when he tells him about his progress, but his inability to make the next step.

It’s an article by someone who’d been…like him: striped of their dignity, forced to endure, but determined to regain their sexuality for themselves. 

By the end of the article, his eyes are wet. But he thinks they’re happy tears.

“I think I’m ready for sex,” he tells Doctor Cas one day.

Doctor Cas doesn’t say yes. Brendon’s pretty sure that’s outside of his job description, but he does ask, “Why do you think that?”

“Well, when Spencer was going down on me the other day,” he starts, intent on throwing in as many details of his love life as he can in retaliation for Doctor Cas never giving him a straight answer, “he was gripping my hips tightly and pressing them down into the bed and I didn’t think about, well you know what, once. And I’ve started taking a more active role in our activities, which really turns Spencer on by the way, and I definitely think I’m starting to enjoy it more.”

“Do you still feel like you have to do this to please Spencer?”

“A little,” Brendon admits, because that’s never not going to be plaguing his mind. “But I think I’m starting to realize that I don’t have to do this.”

"Then why do it at all?" Dr. Cas asks.

"I want to do this for myself. I want to regain my sexuality. I want to be in charge. I don't want this to be something else that asshole stole from me."

Doctor Cas glances at the clock, Brendon’s eyes following. _Wow, it’s been a whole hour already,_ he thinks, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair.

“Looks like our hour is up, Brendon. Why don’t you take the week to think about what you’ve told me this week, and will discuss it more next time?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Brendon says, rolling his eyes, but smiles at the doc on his way out. He feels good about this. For once, it’s starting to feel like he’s moved on. He’s not over it, not completely, and he never will be, but he’s starting to realize he can pick up his shattered pieces and rebuild himself.

It’s important not to rush things with Spencer, though. They don’t need another disaster on their hands. So he spends the week visualizing what sex with Spencer might be like, a tip Doctor Cas gave him, and waits until his next session before trying anything.

When Doctor Cas gives him the go ahead at the next session to try taking things to the next level with Spencer in his own roundabout way,  Brendon doesn’t waste time.

He smokes some pot – totally legal, he’s a card carrier – just to calm down and get over the last of his nerves from the appointment, and then, completely naked, attacks Spencer the second he gets through the door of their bedroom.

“I want you,” he murmurs, pressing his forehead into Spencer’s neck, and wrapping his arms around Spencer’s waist.

“Not that I’m not all for it, but I thought you didn’t want to try that again until you knew what it was like.”

“What?” Brendon asked, pushing away from Spencer enough to look into his eyes. “Are we talking about the same thing?”

“Are we?” Spencer asked, his voice squeaking like a prepubescent teen on the ‘we.’ He presses a quick kiss to Spencer’s lips, enjoying how flustered Brendon made him look.

“Spencer, I want _you_ ,” he emphasizes the ‘you,’ doing everything short of winking to get his point across.

“To? You want me to?”

“I want you to fuck me.”

Spencer chokes on his own spit. “Brendon, it’s…you know you don’t have to, right?”

“I know I don’t have to. I want to. Look,” he added, when the skeptical look on Spencer’s face doesn't go away. “I’ve already talked to death about this with Doctor Cas. He agrees with me.”

“Did he say that?”

“He’s a therapist, of course he didn’t say that, but he does agree with me. And I’ve already tried fingering myself a few times and it…”

“It what?” Spencer asks, settling his hands on Brendon’s biceps.

Brendon feels the heat rush to his cheeks. He knows he shouldn’t be embarrassed about this, but sometimes it’s hard to remember that.  

“It felt pretty good, and I didn’t panic once.”

His eyes search Brendon’s face looking for something, but he’s not going to find it, because Brendon is ready for this. “Just answer one question for me: why? Why do _you_ want to do this?”

Brendon recites the same little speech he gave Dr. Cas the other day. He does want to please Spencer, but he needs to do this for himself, too. 

“Okay,” Spencer finally says, “but I can and will stop if I think you are uncomfortable with anything, even if you don’t tell me.”

And that’s exactly why Brendon knows everything is going to be okay. Spence without a doubt would treat him like royalty, exactly the way his first time should have been. 

He grabs Spencer’s hand and leads him towards the bed, the lube and condoms already laid out on the bedside table. The weed is still curling around his body, keeping the worst of the nervous jitters away as he lies down on the bed, pulling Spencer on top of him. But he’s not so high that he doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing.

He’s not scarred, per say, just nervous and that’s perfectly normal for a first time. But he also knows he’s in good hands.

***

**VERY SHORT BONUS SCENE (From Zach's POV during the detox scene after the cabin. You may need to read Trading Mistakes to understand this one.)**

Zack thought he could no longer be horrified by the things he saw and heard. Growing up on the southside of Los Angeles, he watched his father beat his mother until Zack grew larger than him and fought back. In a bar in Chicago, he watched a man bleed to death practically in his arms as Zach held a dirty frayed black shirt to a knife wound in the man’s gut. He didn’t know the man before that night, and had simply been trying to break up a fight between the dying man and another belligerent drunk. The sudden and shocking death sent him on a weekend long binger.  He regularly watched teenagers who weren’t even old enough to know what sex  was in his opinion, throw themselves at not only the band, but anyone they thought could get them closer to Panic.

Nothing should shock him anymore, or so he thought.

Zack was very, very wrong.

It’s Brendon that breaks first, he thinks, crashes hard from whatever drugs he’d taken at the cabin.  If he was paying more attention, he would have noticed it was Brendon that broke first because Spencer never stopped, Jon just gave up one demon for another, and Ryan, well, Zack can never quite tell what was going on with him.

Brendon warned him on the phone, said he had secrets, secrets he’d already told too many people, and didn’t want anybody else besides Zack to know.

He was only a 20-year-old kid, Zack thought at the time, his secrets really couldn’t be that bad, nothing Zack hadn’t seen before.

He should have taken the warning at face value for what it was.

They all gathered in the living room instead of spreading out across Brendon’s house, looking red-eyed and twitchy, a touch of fear in their eyes. He tells them he’ll call an ambulance the second he thinks he needs to, he’ll help them get sober, but he’s not messing around if their lives are on the line. He doesn’t think a single one of them hears a word he says.

Spencer nods, pulls out his sleeping bag, lays it meticulously on the floor by the wall, and then passes out on the floor next to the sleeping bag. Brendon collapses on the couch, Jon collapsing on top of him until Brendon elbows him off. Ryan paces. He wanders back and forth down the hallways, across the rooms, settles next to Spencer briefly, before getting up to wander again. He crashes soon enough,  though, sitting straight up in a chair with his eyes open. If Zack hadn’t spent so long touring with him, he would have thought Ryan still awake.

It’s the third day when it happens, when the twitching and incoherent mumbling begin. Jon, the most sober acting, suspiciously so in Zack’s mind, keeps sending worried glances towards Brendon, which heighten Zack’s anxiety. He keeps his phone tightly clasped in his hand, ready to call 911 at any moment.

It never even registers in his mind that it’s not that he needs to be worried about.

The truth is almost too painful to bear. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary:** Brendon tends not to eat for days on end when he is nervous or stressed. While making their first CD Spencer notices this and decides to make a nice dinner for Brendon. 

 

**

“You didn’t eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner today and no one saw you eat dinner last night. Brendon,” he said, grabbing Brendon’s wrist from across their tiny kitchen table. “When was the last time you ate?”

“Yesterday at lunch,” Brendon said, staring him dead in the eyes, but there was a slight uptilt to the end of his words, like he was asking a question.

“Try again.”

Brendon's eyes shuttered, and he looked away, hunching his shoulders in on himself. “Sunday.”

“But that was…” four days ago, Spencer finished in his head. Sunday. He remembered Sunday. Sunday had been bad.

Everybody accidentally slept in assuming someone else would set an alarm and wake everybody else up in the process. It was 1 pm by the time Spencer slipped from his bunk, stomach rumbling and with a desperate urge to pee. When he saw the time on the clock on the microwave, he did a double take before groaning and smacking his head a little too hard on the counter. He woke Brendon and Brent up first so they could be a united front against Ryan.

Even though Ryan was just as much to blame as the rest of them, he’d been pissy and snippy the entire day over the lost time to work on their first album. They had a little under two weeks left to finish the entire thing. 

Brendon’s voice had been blown out from the moment they’d stepped foot in Maryland, but that day Spencer was convinced that Ryan's fury terrified Brendon’s voice into working. They attempted to record as many as the vocals as they could on Sunday, laying track after track as every one else pretty much just sat around, except Ryan who wouldn’t stop yelling at Brendon.

It was, “You’re voice is too flat,” or “You’re voice is too nasally,” or “You’re not putting emphasis on the right word,” or “You’re doing that wrong,” the entire day.  

At dinner, Ryan yelled at Brent because his Lo Mein take out was too salty.

He yelled at Spencer for taking more than five minutes to take a shower because Spencer was wasting valuable time.

By the time Ryan said, “Goddamn it, Brendon, are you even trying?” Spencer was ready to punch him in the throat.

He kicked Ryan out of the apartment, told him he better take a walk right _now_ and come back ready to act like a decent person _,_ and spent the next 20 minutes trying to reassure Brendon that he was doing a great job. Clearly, he did not get through to either of them.

He can’t fix Ryan. He’s tried, and failed, many times over the years. If Ryan wants to push him away, there’s not a whole lot he can do, but wait for Ryan to come back around again.  He learned his lesson in high school and got his ass kicked for it.

But Brendon might be more malleable. Brendon pretended he didn’t need people or their approval, when really all he wanted was for someone to hold on tight and tell him he was doing good. Brendon didn’t need force, not like Ryan. He just needed someone to care.

“If I made us a nice homemade dinner as a reward for both of us for working so hard on the CD, would you eat it?”

Brendon’s teeth worried at his already bitten lips, before he nodded.

“Let’s go shopping then,” he said, leading Brendon from the apartment with an arm around his shoulder. He learned enough cooking from his mother that he was fairly confident he could handle some sort of pasta dish or maybe some barbeque chicken and a pasta salad. He’d figure it out on the way.

He left Brendon in the juice isle to text Ryan and Brent: _B and I are making dinner in the apartment when we get back and you’re not invited. Make yourself scarce or leave the apartment for a couple hours. Don’t care which._

Of course, when he got back, he excused himself to use the bathroom, leaving Brendon in the kitchen, and Ryan just  _had_ to confront him.

“I don’t think now is really a good time to start trying to get into Brendon’s pants.”

He resisted, yet again, the urge to punch Ryan in the throat and instead rubbed his thumb and forefinger across his eyebrows to prevent the forming headache. “I’m not,” he forcefully insisted. “We’re just making dinner,” _cuz he hasn’t eaten since you yelled at him on Sunday,_ he added in his head.

“Then why aren’t I invited,” Ryan prissily replied. He knew Ryan was being a jerk because his feelings are hurt.

But Spencer was just so pissed right now. It wasn't entirely Ryan’s fault, it was also the stress and the worry and the homesickness. All of them are stressed beyond what they thought possible trying to make their first CD in just four minuscule weeks and the pressure was a sumo wrestler sitting on all of their chests threatening to suffocate them. But Ryan was the only one being an asshole about it. Spencer pressed his lips together, and resisted the urge to snap. “Because I’m not certain you can stop being a jerk long enough for the rest of us to enjoy dinner.”

“You’re mad at me.”

“Are you really going to do this right now?” he asked, and then shook his head. He was too mad and too upset for this conversation at the moment. He knew he might say something he regretted later.

Ryan crossed his arms in reply.

Spencer snapped. “Yes, yes I am mad at you, okay? Everyone is stressed out, Ryan, everyone. We all know how much this means, but you are the only one acting like an asshole. I can take it, cuz I know you don’t really mean it, and I know this is just how you act when you’re stressed. But I think Brent might actually hate you right now and Brendon’s….” _Brendon’s blaming himself for everything._ “We just need a small break,” Spencer said, the ‘ _from you’_ is heavily implied.


End file.
